


Portraits

by rustandstardust



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, M/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-18
Updated: 2012-04-18
Packaged: 2017-11-03 20:34:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/385650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rustandstardust/pseuds/rustandstardust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spoilers, but only if you don't know what happened to Regulus in 1979. It is his last night alive, and he wants to draw. Mentions of Sirius/Regulus and small hints of Sirius/James, Sirius/Remus, and James/Regulus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Portraits

**Author's Note:**

> I've always liked the idea that Regulus was a hidden artist.

He was always skilled at drawing, but he hasn’t drawn since the end of sixth year. Knowing your death is fast-approaching was a heady tonic to swallow; it led to shakes and shiver of fear that only courage could counteract, and he’d always been lacking in that.

It is his last night alive, and he wants to draw. He carpets the drawing room in thick paper; the kind nothing bleeds through – thick and creamy in color so unalike his own paper-thin skin, closer to translucent than any sort of pale, milky with tiny blue veins and only the slightest tinge of color. Tonight he sketches not in pencil, not in the temporary, forgiving dark grey of graphite, but in ink; deepest black and smooth, the lines abrupt – there is finality about him.

He draws himself first, a startling full-body sketch, a retrospective. He is too thin and he knows it, gaunt and frail and all angles where there used to be subtle curves. He thinks of himself as a porcelain doll that hasn’t been properly taken care of, but he knows that’s purely romanticizing the truth; his condition is no fault but his own and he is simply a skeleton. He draws the jut of his hips under the waistband of his trousers, feet in heavy boots and his hands almost obscured by the long sleeves of his jacket. Eyes sunken, hollow (dead, he tells himself, dead soon) and empty, he’s a ghost of the boy he was only a year and a half ago.

He draws the people he associates with the most (he hesitates to say work; there is no payout in the life he’s chosen; but then again, he reminds himself that it is past tense, he has officially deserted and no one knows) – Bellatrix, his cousin and it is an unkind likeness, attractive but deadly, hideous in a way, the twisted look on her face when she casts a killing curse is captured in the swipe of the brush, the line of pure black ink.  Her eyes are dark and slanted in fury and hatred and he shivers; he’s drawn her too accurately and she stares out at him, accusingly. He has never seen beauty in her malice, to him there is only thin lips spread in a grimace or a sneer, condescension in the slope of her nose and fight in her posture. He draws Rodolphus beside her and he guesses a few of the angles, the bend of limbs; he knows him not in an intimate sense, only knows the Rodolphus of parties and killings, upright and sociable, noble or predatory, homicidal. Rabastan is a shadow behind him, but a shadow rendered in startling clarity – the shape of his eyes is different, the line of his jaw not as square; he is shorter, thinner.  Regulus knows him from encounters he told himself he needed, he knows the shape of his body under the robe of darkest black. He draws Barty Crouch, Jr. with his short tousled hair and the manic look he always wears, a little unhinged, a little unstable. He is the favorite of the two of them, in their skewed ‘training’ under the Lestrange brothers, it is Barty who casts his curses with malice at the muggles they kidnap, it is Barty who delights in drawing the runic symbols in their skin with the sharpened tip of his wand. He draws him with his wand in one hand and a pocketknife in the other, weapons of destruction, of murder and he feels a sick tickle to his stomach.

He draws Severus last, on the edges of the cluster the others collect in because he has always suspected Severus did not join with his whole heart, though it would be imprudent to ask. He has always felt a distant sort of kinship with him, he knows his hurt, he knows the abandonment of losing the one person you’d given your heart to from a young age. Severus is turned away from the Death Eaters, recognizable with his infamous nose and beetle-black eyes; shoulders hunched, insecure, nervous, and beside him he draws the pretty muggle-born (he can’t remember the last time he said ‘mudblood’), girl, Lily, with her famous green eyes closed and her hair falling onto her shoulders in a subtle curl, a circular swipe of the brush finishes it. Beside her he draws James, the James of now, the James he saw last three weeks ago in the dark corner of a bar in the dingy corners of London’s underbelly, the James Potter who he shagged in an alley out of loneliness, out of need, the James Potter he may have loved at some point, in some way. Something developed between the Black brothers and the overconfident Quidditch prodigy over the course of Regulus’ fifth year, when every moment stolen was shared between the three of them, and the memories are painfully bittersweet to think about as he draws James’ messy hair, his handsome smile, his legs in blue denim. Behind the portrait in the lightest presses of the brush he draws the James he remembers from Hogwarts, in Quidditch robes, hears the arrogant proclamation of victory over Slytherin in his head, the cocky grin he’d always worn when he wanted to shag.

He stops when James is done for a drink, a swig of Firewhiskey straight from the long-necked, tinted bottle – Sirius had always favored it more than him, risked the wrath of their mother in order to steal it from their absent father’s study, but tonight he likes the burn.

He draws Remus Lupin next, who he should hate. His downcast, sad eyes, his nose with the scar across it, his lackluster hair in the small ponytail at the nape of his neck are all captured in the strokes of the brush, the ink from the vial, the level growing low. Behind him draws a wolf and a dog in wispy strokes, like dream clouds; the wolf nuzzles into the dog’s neck, needy. He hadn’t told Sirius but he’d known their secret all along, garnered from quiet observation, and he finds a dog the most fitting for his brother, the ever-loyal, at least to the ones that didn’t wrong him. Tears fall onto the paper and blur the line of Remus’ shoulder and he stops for a moment, wipes his eyes and takes a deep drink of the liquor. He’s not sure why he’s crying; if it’s because of Remus Lupin and what he has, the man he calls his that Regulus no longer can, or if he’s crying for him in some vain hope that perhaps Sirius will be different now, maybe broken without his baby brother. The Firewhiskey is close to scalding on his throat but he ignores it, dips the brush into the ink bottle again and realizes he’s reached the point of the drawing he’s been dreading.

He draws Sirius with a cigarette in his hand and his hair messy but elegant, just as he remembers, draws his lips parted like he’s about to say something, the corner of his mouth turned up in his ever-infectious smile. Regulus doesn’t know quite how he conveys Sirius’ eyes, shockingly he doesn’t ruin their lightness, their mesmerizing, gripping quality.  The angle of his body is turned away from Remus, and it’s a selfish choice, to draw him facing away, but Regulus remembers a time in Sirius’ sixth year when, had he been more manipulative, he could have taken Sirius back forever. Perhaps things would have been different, but he allows the thought only a few fleeting seconds of life before the rational corner of his mind snuffs it out. Sirius wears his leather jacket; his favorite one, the one he left Grimmauld Place in that cool summer night. It’s startlingly similar to the leather jacket Regulus is wearing, but not quite. His shirt beneath the jacket is wrinkled, messy; it rides up over the gorgeous planes of his stomach. Regulus sketches in the lines of his hips, the thin line of dark hair he’d kissed down on more than one occasion; with careful precision he recalls each minute detail of the brother he misses, the straight line of his thin legs in the tight, dark jeans he loved and his feet in leather boots. The tears that slide down the straight line of Regulus’ noble nose fall onto the paper and sound too loud, a cacophonous disturbance in the quiet, dusty stillness of the drawing room. They blur Sirius’ body, his hand that rests in the pocket of his jeans, the dark hem of his jacket. The ink pools in dark black puddles and spreads outward and he wonders morbidly if he’ll bleed when they catch him, kill him, if it’ll spread out from cuts like that. The curl of the smoke tendrils from Sirius’ cigarette becomes other, small sketches – Sirius’ hand in his, differing because his brother’s fingers are longer, his own thinner; Sirius’ laughing face, all the things he’d loved about him. His shoulders are shaking and his hand is jerky by the time he’s done, he no longer trusts the precision of the brush in his hand except to sign his initials in thick lines, R.A.B. pressed against the line of Sirius’ arm, like a possessive tattoo.

He lets it sit for a few moments, lets the ink dry before he rolls it up with a flick of his wand. The corner of Sirius’ forgotten room is littered with old rolls of parchment and he tucks it there, hidden amongst essays on potions and magical history and wonders if it will ever be found, questions if he wants it to be found.

He wonders the same about his own body later that night as the Inferi drag his body downwards – will they ever find his body?


End file.
